James: James Schramko here, SuperFastBusiness.com. I’m with Kory Basaraba from GrowFastMarketing.com. Hey, Kory.
Kory: Hey, James.
James: The miracles of modern technology, we can have a great conversation about traffic and conversions on the internet, even if we’re in different countries.
Today, I wanted to ask you about something you mentioned to me very recently, and that is, you believe there’s one thing stopping most marketers from doubling their business and that’s a pretty bold statement to just drop out there. And I wanted to ask you if you’d be happy to share your thoughts around this for people who watch these videos.
Kory: Sure, well, it’s true and it’s kind of a trick statement. The tail end of that statement…
James: I hope it’s not clickbait.
Kory: No, no clickbait here, sir. Yeah, no, I couldn’t sleep at night if I clickbaited you, James.
James: Well, I don’t want to clickbait my audience. It’s not my style. One reason people open my emails is the subject line is always very accurate and whatever’s in the subject line will be in the email and I can’t stand people dancing around and around the mulberry bush and then you find out they’re actually not even there.
Kory: Yeah. Well, that’s good. So I’ve got the bar high, I’m going to give you a payoff for that. Yeah, the idea is that at any one moment, there’s one thing that’s stopping your business from scaling. So if your goal is to increase sales, and you’re buying traffic, and you’ve got a funnel, and you’re trying to grow an online business, at any point in time, there’s one thing that’s stopping that growth from happening. And the trick is to figure out what that one thing is.
James: I was hoping that you’re going to tell me what that was.
Kory: So really, the technique is to assume that something is not right and needs fixing.
James: It’s actually very similar to my methodology when I was running a large business with about 70-something staff. It varied, it went up and down right? 78, 71. I knew, at any one time, someone was causing trouble. I just had to identify who. I’d walk around the business twice-a-day paying attention to what’s going on. And I’d find them sometimes, you know, the detailer who was consuming far more car wax than we had cars and I figured out he must be selling it on the weekend at the market or something.
So there’s something in your marketing machine at any one time that is not optimized as much as it could be. That could be the constraint that if you fix will get a substantial increase. Is that right?
Kory: That’s exactly it. It’s a way of explaining this concept of a constraint because it’s a little abstract and theoretical, right? But if at any moment, you have a constraint, but you don’t know what it is, you could end up spending a lot of time and energy fixing something that isn’t the problem, right?
So here’s the analogy: if my car’s parked in the driveway, and it broke and it won’t run, at the moment I walk out, all I know is it didn’t start. I’m not sure why it didn’t start. It could be a lot of reasons but it’s not running. Now if I’m really comfortable changing tires, I might go start changing tires on my car even though it has no chance of actually fixing the problem. The problem could be under the hood, but under the hood can be scary and I have to trust someone else’s judgment. And so there’s this tendency if we are marketing, to look for solutions where we’re comfortable.
So for example, if you’re buying Facebook ads, but it’s not working, you’re spending more money than you’re making back, a lot of people will start obsessing over their Facebook campaigns and try to lower the cost per click and changing out the creative every day.
James: Or changing out their Facebook ad agency. I mean, I can’t tell you how many times I hear this story that they’ve been burned by their Facebook ads guy. You know, no Facebook ads lady or man can make my campaign convert, and it’s always the problem of the Facebook ads rep. I have to think maybe they’re changing tires and they haven’t checked if the battery is charged.
Kory: That’s 100%, James. And I’m just trying to stay calm, you know, because there are some that heard about me – I’m the first out there to do the work. But yeah, if you’ve gone through five agencies, there comes a point-
James: That the problem might be something else.
Kory: Right.
James: And you’ve said this before, right? It’s not just the ad, is it? It’s the page it goes to, it’s the person that you’re aiming the message at. We’ve done some training around the difference between an avatar and the customer journey. Okay, so you run the ad, you know who you’re running it to, you know, where they’re at, in their journey. It’s all working well, the page is, okay, but then maybe it takes you 60 or 90 or 120 days to break-even. And all your money is in the back-end. But you don’t know that because you’re not tracking any data or you got no metrics, there’s no dashboard. So you really need the data part, or the whole first two parts are useless. It’s a guessing game.
Kory: It’s a guessing game until this moment happens when – it’s like an evolution of an entrepreneur. You see those little things where we kind of age and we get taller and taller, we start walking. There’s a point in every entrepreneurial journey where we start to insist on good data. It’s kind of like a rite of passage into adulthood, right?
James: It was only like in the last two years that I’ve really just drilled down. I mean, I’ve always done spreadsheets and stuff. I learned these skills from running real businesses. But I wanted more. And I went and got toolsets, and I hired experts. I paid them to come and show me what’s happening in my system. And it was, you know, it’s funny, you use that car metaphor because when I used to run a Mercedes-Benz dealership, we would have cars come into the service department with faults. And they had a diagnostic process, which was literally the mechanic would do step-by-step diagnosis, and do one thing at a time until they discovered the problem. They’ll plug the computer into the brain of the car, and it would actually say do this. So they go and do that and hit the button. And it says to do this and they do that. And through a systematic process, they’d figure it out.
But the thing I love about the car metaphor the most, going back to you in the garage, right? By the way, while you were changing the tire, I already hopped on my motorbike and I was already in town. So, I’d change vehicles. That radical innovation is to completely bypass the optimization process. But let’s say we only have the car…
Kory: I love that about you. That’s right, like, here’s an obstacle, ride around it.
James: That’s it. If my podcast is broken, then I’ll be just on the Facebook ads over there.
But let’s say we do have the car like the critical difference between being able to drive into town and pick up food supplies or not before the big storm comes. It could be our ability to identify that difference. But the thing I love about this the most, and I learned this from Eli Goldratt, from his theory of constraints is the inherent simplicity of it is that very small changes, like tiny changes, can completely change the outcome of the results.
For example, maybe the problem with the car that it won’t start is that we’ve taken the lead off the battery because we were away and we forgot to put it on. So maybe we pull out our little spanner, and we just adjust the lead and we pop it back on, we turn the key, now it starts. That’s the difference between able to drive 100 miles in the next hour and a half. We don’t want to break the speed limit and get supplies for our winter cabin stint and survive versus sitting there changing a tire one after the other and never even finding the real problem.
So the cool thing is, no matter what sort of a mess you’re in today, if you get the right mechanic to come in and diagnose what’s wrong, and I’m going to suggest you for this Kory, then you could actually probably get up and running way quicker than if you’re trying to figure it out yourself. If you’re not sure if you don’t have the tools to do it, or you just don’t even know what you’re looking at, which is probably part of the problem for a lot of people.
Kory: Sure, sure. you nailed it. Once you know what the problem is, often the fix is not that complicated. But if you’re not sure what the problem is, you can blow hours and months wasting time on things that aren’t going to work. So yeah, that’s a perfect example.
James: Right. So if you want to know what’s going on with your ads or your landing page or your back-end data, you’ve got those bits but it’s not working. Get in touch with Kory, GrowFastMarketing.com.
And Kory, as always, thank you so much for sharing these tips. I now believe it’s true that there is probably one thing stopping you from doubling your business. You just got to find out what it is and fix it.
Kory: Thank you, James.
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